


Love starts slow

by isyotm



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Domestic Fluff, M/M, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 09:27:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7042444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isyotm/pseuds/isyotm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andrew and Neil love each other, even if they never say it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love starts slow

 

Love is quiet.

It creeps on little cat’s paws, rolls in like a mist. It settles over everything like dew, trickles through the cracks in the heart, and seeps into dry earth where dormant seeds wait to spring to life.

Love is warm.

A love reciprocated is like sunlight. It warms all over, it helps things grow. It’s like moonlight, pure and silver, beautiful and full of magic.

It takes them a long time to call it love. Love before has never been good. What someone called love before was a fist, a knife. Visits in the night, hands where they weren’t wanted.

Andrew calls it hate at first. “I hate you,” he says, over and over. He tells Neil he’s frustrating, stupid, he wants to kill him more than 90% of the time, although he confesses that sometimes Neil can be “interesting.” That’s all he allows himself.

Neil doesn’t call it anything. Attraction, maybe. A small bit of curiosity. The memory of his mother’s stinging slaps is too strong, her fierce warning that love is a mistake, love could ruin everything for them, love could betray them and get them killed.

But they feel it and, as Nicky once joked, although it was closer to the truth than either of them wanted to admit at the time, it softens them. Neil is still afraid, will probably always be afraid, but he trusts that not every shadowy corner holds a boogeyman. He stands his ground even though every instinct in him tells him to run. When you spend your whole life running, it’s hard to stop, but he has something—or rather, someone—to ground him. Someone to convince him it’s worth staying in one place.

Andrew’s sharp edges will never fully leave him. Like Neil, he’s spent his whole life building defenses, but his are sharp knives and sharp words and cold distance. He keeps his feet planted firmly on the ground, but now he is willing to bend. One night, he hands the knives to Neil and in the morning he doesn’t ask for them back. The gesture means more than any words.

Love is an ocean.

Its waves roll against the shore and back out again, constant, insistent. It carries things away but, with patience and no small amount of luck, it can also give them back.

Love gives them back trust, piece by small, hard-won piece.

They wake softly now. A hand guiding Andrew gently from the realm of sleep is no longer met with violence, no elbows or fists lashing out to warn away unwelcome touches. Neil no longer wakes with the taste of fear sour and sharp in his mouth, ready to run, to flee from a perceived threat.

Perhaps one day they will also wake slowly, meandering between sleep and wakefulness until bright sunlight and chirping birds win out over warm, soft beds and the comfort of each other’s arms and they pull themselves out of bed to start the day. Perhaps one day sounds in the night will no longer have them jolting awake, reaching for knives and guns that aren’t there, that they’ve decided they no longer need.

Perhaps.

But for now, they start slow.

**Author's Note:**

> The beginning lines are inspired by the poem "Fog" by Carl Sandburg.


End file.
